Principal Engineer

Scope 

We are seeking a highly accomplished Principal Engineer to serve as the technical authority and architectural leader for our cloud-native platform and infrastructure within the Financial Platform organization. In this role, you will define the platform architecture roadmap, design mission-critical infrastructure patterns, and lead the technical execution of platforms that power large-scale, distributed financial applications. 

Key Responsibilities 

• Platform Architecture & Strategic Direction: Define and drive the target-state architecture for our next-generation, cloud-native platform (Kubernetes, multi-region cloud topologies, and AI/workload enablement). Translate overarching business goals into scalable, resilient, and decoupled platform capabilities. 

• Hands-On Core Engineering: Lead by example by writing production-grade code, building foundational custom tooling/operators (Golang, Python), authoring reusable Terraform modules, and designing reference implementations for engineering teams. 

• Technical Leadership & Mentorship: Serve as a mentor and technical coach to junior and mid-level engineers. Facilitate design reviews, establish architecture RFC processes, conduct deep code/infrastructure reviews, and foster a strong culture of engineering excellence. 

• Container Platforms & Orchestration: Architect resilient, multi-cluster Kubernetes topologies at scale. Define best practices for workload scheduling, networking (service mesh), custom controllers/operators, GitOps workflows (ArgoCD/Flux), and multi-tenant isolation. 

•  Enterprise CI/CD & Developer Experience (DevEx): Architect automated, self-service golden paths and progressive delivery pipelines (canary, blue-green) that minimize cognitive load for application developers while ensuring strict deployment guardrails. 

•  Zero-Trust Security & Policy-as-Code: Embed DevSecOps at the architectural level—designing policy-as-code frameworks (OPA/Kyverno), centralized secrets management (HashiCorp Vault), secure supply chain standards (SBOM, image signing, Trivy), and compliance baselines (SOC 2, ISO 27001). 

•  Observability, SRE & Chaos Engineering: Design holistic telemetry strategies utilizing OpenTelemetry. Define enterprise SLI/SLO standards, error budget policies, resilience testing/chaos engineering, and lead complex root-cause analyses (RCA) for critical production incidents. 

• FinOps & Performance Optimization: Architect cost-efficient cloud topologies. Establish capacity planning models, multi-region traffic routing, right-sizing strategies, and automated cost-governance guardrails. 

Basic Qualifications 

• Experience: 7+ years of hands-on experience in Platform Engineering, SRE, Distributed Systems, or Cloud Architecture, with a proven track record of designing and operating large-scale, production-grade distributed systems. 

• Architecture & System Design: Demonstrated expertise in architecting complex, highly available, fault-tolerant, and secure cloud topologies (AWS, Azure, or GCP). 

• Deep Hands-on Coding & Automation: Proficiency in at least one modern systems programming language (e.g., Golang, Python) along with advanced scripting (Bash). Strong foundation in data structures, algorithms, and systems software design. 

• Infrastructure-as-Code Mastery: Expert-level proficiency with

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   Terraform(custom provider/module development, state locking, drift detection) and Policy-as-Code engines (e.g., OPA, Rego, Kyverno). 

• Kubernetes Internals: Comprehensive understanding of Kubernetes internals (control plane components, CNI/CSI, custom controllers/operators, RBAC, API extensions, and scheduling primitives). 

• Mentorship & Influence: Proven track record of guiding junior engineers, driving engineering consensus across disparate teams, and leading technical initiatives without direct authority. 

• Observability & Reliability: Hands-on experience with modern observability platforms, distributed tracing with OpenTelemetry, Prometheus/Grafana ecosystems, and enterprise SRE practices. 

• Education: Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience. 

 Preferred Qualifications 

• Experience architecting platforms within highly regulated domains (e.g., Financial Services, FinTech, Banking). 

• Deep experience with Securing Cloud Native Platform. 

• Experience designing, building, or operating large-scale Data Platforms is highly desirable.  

• Active contributions to open-source cloud-native projects (CNCF ecosystem).